Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday May 21, 2012 @06:02PM
from the crank-it-out dept.

redletterdave writes "On Monday, Foxconn agreed to invest $210 million to help Apple build out a new production line for 'unspecified components.' The 40,000-square-meter plant plans to hire roughly 35,800 new employees to help assemble parts for either desktop and laptop computers, iPhones, iPads, iPods, or possibly even new products or devices. Apple projects the plant's annual output between $949 million to $1.1 billion, and also estimates the import and export value at roughly $55.8 million."

Don't be an idiot. The more people we have, the higher the rate of technological advancement will happen. Humans are the ultimate resource. Without people eventually development would stagnate or even reverse itself. It has happened before when there were large population implosions (fall of the Roman Empire, Black Death, etc).

The problem with your argument is thus, Humans are NOT the ultimate resource but SMART humans ARE. the problem is the smart are NOT breeding in any real numbers while the dumb as fuck, barely able to count their change total retards are popping out kids by the pile. Hell didn't you see that story that went around last week about the guy that had THIRTY KIDS and wanted them to cut down his child support because he only makes minimum wage (and frankly always will) even though divided up among that many damned kids they each get on average $1.94 a month?

Sadly what we are seeing is the simple fact that while a comedy Idiocracy is rapidly becoming reality. When you have someone with a 90 IQ frankly education will only go so far, because just as you can't train someone without the genetically gifted muscle type (lack of lactic acid buildup but off the top of my head i can't remember if there is a term for it) to be a world class or even state level sprinter you simply can't turn people with 80 to 90 IQ into rocket scientists, it simply can NOT be done.

Whether you choose to believe it or not frankly a HELL of a lot of the work at the bottom of the ladder in the USA right now is simply "make work" that wouldn't be feasible if the government didn't pay for it by taking it out of your pocket. Walmart even shows a training video on how to apply for food stamps for Pete's sake! Do you HONESTLY think if those government programs disappeared tomorrow it would be cheaper for the stores like Walmart to pay a living wage than to simply automate?

In the end we are playing IQ musical chairs and more and more simply will never get a seat. Most of the minimum wage jobs in the USA could be replaced by machines tomorrow if government programs didn't artificially tilt the favor for humans. Hell you could replace most fast food with automated assembly quite easily, stocking shelves with robots, self checkout lines, hell you could even replace most plumbers and electricians by just using prefabbed homes.

Whether we like it or not the day is RAPIDLY approaching where capitalism, like every other ism before it, will simply fail. If the workers can't trade their labor for capital then how is capitalism gonna survive? We are already seeing the beginnings of it by how so few at the top can control so much of the capital while it becomes ever harder for those at the bottom to rise above anything but poverty because they simply can't get the capital required to advance from labor alone. Did you know you can put the ones that control over 80% of the capitol in your average HS gym and still have seats left over? This is a sign that the system is failing because otherwise those workers killing themselves daily would be able to work their way into that club but the majority just can't.

In the end it just doesn't work friend, you have nearly half a billion people in the USA alone and with just current technology you could get by just fine without any real losses with just 1/5th of that number. Mark my words the next bubble to burst will be the education bubble as millions go into debt they will never be able to pay only to find that the jobs simply don't exist. With robots and computers frankly we just DO NOT NEED all of these people, so short of make work or handouts you are gonna have some major upheavals as all these unneeded people aren't simply gonna wander off and die, they WILL fight back any way they can. But in the end one simply can't escape the simple fact that we have millions more people than we have jobs that need doing.

Just because you outsourced most of the work to China it doesn't mean it doesn't need to be done by someone as this news tidbit clearly shows. Just because it is across the ocean it doesn't mean there aren't people actually doing a significant part of the job. In a different society if there was less work to do and there was a superabundance of resources and goods the number of working hours would be reduced (some corporations like Google actually do this by giving their employees time to do their own acti

Chinese complain and guess what? Corps are already starting to move to Malaysia. Just as it started here its the cheap plastic items like buckets and trash cans that are currently made in Malaysia but if the Chinese ask for more they will find themselves on the breadlines as well.

And your second point is ENTIRELY GOVERNMENT WORK which can NOT happen if there is no CAPITAL to take from the workers to pay for that work! or sure DC thinks they can keep doing it without any pesky taxes but you get what we have

Don't be an idiot. The more people we have, the higher the rate of technological advancement will happen. Humans are the ultimate resource. Without people eventually development would stagnate or even reverse itself. It has happened before when there were large population implosions (fall of the Roman Empire, Black Death, etc).

A Brief History Of
China's One-Child Policy [time.com]:"Even if China's population multiplies many times, she is fully capable of finding a solution; the solution is production," Mao Zedong proclaimed in 1949. "Of all things in the world, people are the most precious." The communist government condemned birth control and banned imports of contraceptives.

Following up, forgot to state in my previous post why I was responding to your statement that "The more people we have, the higher the rate of technological advancement will happen. Humans are the ultimate resource.".

The reason I pointed out Mao ZheDong, was that he said something very similar, prior to embarking on the disastrous policies described my post above -- that he considered humans to be a resource rather than a burden, and therefore more people would equal more growth.

And you cannot believe how cheap they are. I order tools from india from time to time. Any type of marking is done by hand. For the majority of the markings, the machinery to do that can of work cost only a few thousands and would run literally forever with little maintenance. Yet, people (and mistake made by those people) are cheaper than that.

It's mostly down to the time it takes to design and construct an assembly line for making electronic products. The time it takes to do all that it generally longer than the production run of the device (especially with smartphones). It's much cheaper and simpler to just get a massive manned production line to do it instead.

There's also some loss of information in TFA. The submitter changed "a plant that covers 40,000 square meters" to "a 40,000 square meters plant". Quite possible there will be more than one floor. A plant with five floors covering 40,000 square meters would be a 200,000 square meter plant.

Depending on how they counted them, there are probably also many employees working outside the plant as well, handling things like transportation and external infrastructure. For a plant of this size, the number of associated employees not actually in the plant could be quite substantial.

I'm sure they know what they're doing. But I do find it interesting that this foxconn plant will employ ten times as many people [fb.com] as all of facebook.com (with 3500 employees). The idea that there could ever be enough "knowledge worker" jobs to replace what manufacturing used to be just doesn't hold up.

Well one hardware device can support a whole lot more than one site or one piece of software. So Foxconn makes hardware for Apple devices. How many app developers in total make software for Apple devices? According to the latest bragging numbers there's over 500,000 apps and while many are simple some are not. And that doesn't include every other site on the Internet who can live off people using the web browser. For that matter, look at PCs and compare the hardware industry to the whole software industry.

Especially since knowledge management is ever increasingly done by machines. Even some tasks which used to require human intelligence like voice recognition or eyeball inspections of produced goods can now be automated. What's left? Making clay pots and selling them? Or perhaps tulips...

Well, if you take my old home town - Glasgow - there are more people working in "knowledge" than there ever were in industry, and this was one of the UK's largest industrial cities.

Knowledge workers have massive multiplicative effects - meaning one knowledge worker typically creates a support base of several other workers - everything from tech support to delivery drivers. Manufacturing jobs don't do that.

What makes you think that manufacturing jobs don't have multiplier effects? You're flat-out wrong. Think about the two specific roles you cited, for a start: tech support and delivery drivers. You don't think there's an analogue to tech support for manufacturing? Trouble-shooting teams? And you don't think that goods need to be transported both to and from manufacturing sites? Manufacturing typically has a *higher* multiplier effect than service jobs. But they're both Good Things.

The marginal multiplier of manufacturing jobs is much lower than for service workers. Adding extra workers to a factory doesn't add to the amount of maintainance the machinery requires, but adding service workers adds a certain amount of tech support requirement.

Of course, this is all very handwavey and it varies hugely by sector. But the point remains that industrial towns that have undergone this transformation succesfully now have higher employment than they did before.

Care to point to some studies that back up your position? You've just reasserted your original statement. Adding extra workers to a factory is typically done because of increasing volumes of output, and that certainly *does* increase maintenance requirements, plus all the suppliers need to make more stuff also, thus adding jobs.

A quick look at the US BEA's website suggests a multiplier of 2.34 for manufacturing vs 1.55 for professional and business services.

Why on earth do they need that many people. Aren't these electronics lines automated? (On another note: When was the last time a U.S. or EU company announced hiring 36,000 people.)

- yeah, because Chinese government hasn't yet mandated an entire slew of things that would prevent a company just from trying to build a business and instead would force a company to look for ways to get away from hiring people and find ways to do the same work without any hiring at all.

This is the direct proof that all this government intervention in the USA and Europe etc. is what PREVENTS JOBS FROM HAPPENING and KILLS EXISTING JOBS.

Not everyone here wants to get rid of regulations like minimum wage, OSHA, and environmental laws. Historically corporations here have screwed the environment (and everything else) if they are not regulated. I think things would be different if somehow the CEO was personally liable to some extent for the corporations' actions but I think we can agree that they are not.

It's so that Apple can have their own clean, friendly production facility so that Foxconn can stop disrupting work at their hellhole^H^H^H^slave camp^H^H^H^H^other sweatshops to comply with public inspections by people who'd be outraged by how they NORMALLY do business.

Wait, are you saying that Apple demanding, and getting, better working conditions for the employees that assemble their products is somehow a bad thing?!? I mean why would you be down on Apple rather than all the other tech companies that outsource to Foxconn and don't make the same demands?

Nooo...he is saying what Apple and Foxconn is doing is simply a variation of a Potemkin Village [wikipedia.org] where you build a front to please the suits but in reality the vast majority of Foxconn workers will be living like shit. This lets Apple say they are "changing things" when in reality they are still doing business with a scummy company, they are simply having a nice front made for THEIR products and their products alone.

Portions of the parts manufacture are automated, but Assembly is done by humans. Don't know if you have ever disassembled a laptop or not, but it is definitely delicate work better done by quick dextrous humans.

Chinese workers are cheap, and plentiful (in the less developed provinces that is, this plant is to set up in Hainan, not in Shenzhen where their main site is).

No matter what, that's going to be one heck of a crowded factory.

40,000 m2 for 35,800 workers: that's just over 1 m2 per employee. Now they're said to work 12 hours a day, so assume two shifts, that's doubling the space to 2 m2 per worker. That's incredibly tight, considering this includes all space for tools and machines, conveyor belts, warehousing

Why on earth do they need that many people. Aren't these electronics lines automated? (On another note: When was the last time a U.S. or EU company announced hiring 36,000 people.)

Only assembly lines in the western world are automated because labor's expensive enough that having a few robot technicians to maintain/program the robots is far cheaper than hiring people to manually do it. In China, labor's so cheap that the initial capital costs of robots and robot technicians aren't recouped by the time the ro

From what I gather, Apple does do some designs in such a way that it requires a lot of people to assemble just so other valued Chinese or foreign companies won't set up a mechanized line to knock out knock offs faster than Apple can produce originals. This means that to knock off an Apple product successfully, you'd need a lot of up front investment, something the knock off companies won't do.

Huh? Huai'an city is not in Hainan. It's in Jiangsu province, about 100km west of Shanghai. Hainan is an island off the southern coast of China, near Vietnam.

The China Daily article [chinadaily.com.cn] says there are two separate projects. Foxconn is both building this plant in Huai'an and starting up a new manufacturing base down in Hainan. The Hainan facility is not necessarily Apple-oriented.

I'll go out on a limb and hazard a guess that this plant is not in the USA and won't provide any jobs in the USA.Too bad that one of America's top companies outsources most of its production. Their profit margins could support USA jobs.

There's another way. Stop this suicidal race to the bottom. It would be nice if we had CEOs that weren't a bunch of Randist supermen, who might actually consider helping the society that let them reach their current heights. Since that doesn't seem likely to happen, I'd settle for raising their taxes. They always complain that increasing taxes will drive away the job creators. From where I sit, those people aren't creating any American jobs, so their argument falls flat.

How much are you willing to pay for your next iPAD? $7,999.00 or $499.00 ?

How much are you willing to pay for your next iTV? $18,999.00 or $999.00 ?

You are the consumer, you vote with your wallet. and get to decide where your next purchase will be made

If you want your next gadget to be made in the US of A, be prepared to pay more, much more than what you are currently willing to pay

Do not blame the CEO, the "Top 1%", for the outsourcing of jobs

It's YOU and ME, the consumers, who have told corporations such as Apple, LOUDLY, with our collective wallets, that we want our next gadget to be CHEAP - and the corporations oblige, by seeking out the place where they can make the gadget with the lowest cost possible, namely the Far East

It's only a minor part of the story. Aside from prices consumers are willing to pay, there are also profits. Even if we are willing to pay more, corporations are still going to outsource to maximize their profits.

I think we just have to accept it. We just have to live with the fact that US is the home of innovation and creative work, but not necessarily manfacturing. I disagree that investing in China creates no US jobs - that's shortsighted. You look at 40K Chinese workers, and you should also look at the

Actually, labour costs are not a major factor in Apple products. Most of it is components and profit. The reason for manufacturing in China is that Foxconn can put fifty thousand workers on a new line tomorrow - which is exactly what happened when Steve Jobs decided the iPhone had to have a glass screen a few weeks before launch. No American factory could come close to the capacity required to make that switch in such a short timeframe.

Wages are a small part of the cost of an iPhone. They could be made in the US for something like $60 more per phone.

If you search for "build iphone in america", you find lots of articles with the same quote:

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, fo

Wages are a small part of the cost of an iPhone. They could be made in the US for something like $60 more per phone.

If you search for "build iphone in america", you find lots of articles with the same quote:

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhoneâ(TM)s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the companyâ(TM)s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

âoeThe speed and flexibility is breathtaking,â the executive said. âoeThereâ(TM)s no American plant that can match that.â

No, I will argue that wage IS the determinant factor

It's much more than the $60.00 more per iPhone

Can you try to imagine Apple does what they did in China in a factory inside the US of A - getting 8,000 workers back to work the production line, in the middle of the night, with just a biscuit and a cup of tea??

1. No worker in America will work for a biscuit and a cup of tea in the middle of the night

2. If they do, the American workers will demand HUGE INCREASE IN WAGE BONUS - much more than the $60 that y

They are not a charity organization. Why would they create much more expensive USA jobs if it doesn't help their business or maximize profits for their shareholders? You might think it's the right thing to do. A shareholder of AAPL might disagree. People who like to buy Apple products might also disagree when the prices go up.

Too bad that one of America's top companies outsources most of its production. Their profit margins could support USA jobs.

Profit is not made on production. That's a very low-margin business, as it's largely unskilled labour. And unskilled labour, by being unskilled, is easily replaceable. The only thing that gives companies like Foxconn a negotiation position is because Foxconn is so big, that they can actually handle the volumes Apple demands, and that they can make significant investments in new plants by themselves. Most factories in China are not that big, can't handle huge volumes, and are not in a strong position to nego

Personally, I think that Apple, Google, et. al. should be required to maintain some sort of interoperability between their media platforms, or at least open them enough that others can compete. If I buy a movie on iTunes, I should be able to play it on an Android machine (there's no real technical obstacle.) Same for books, music, etc.

This is clear monopolistic behavior, and should be crushed like a bug.

Did anybody ready the article? The plant is being built in Taiwan, not in the People's Republic of China.

Yes we did, you just had a reading comprehension fail. The plant is being built in Hainan (a province of the PRC). The press statement is being issued from Taiwan ROC, where Foxconn's corporate offices are.

I buy locally (or at least nationally) produced products when possible.

With electronics, that's pretty much NOT possible, with some small exceptions.

At least with Apple, they are making some efforts for transparency, and improvement in the conditions of factory workers. Currently there is NO other major electronics consumer that I have the same degree of assurances from, not within an order of magnitude...

To that end, I have stopped buying NON-Apple products when possible. Normally in the past I bought no

I remember several years ago (5 maybe?), a report came out about how "green" various laptop manufacturers were. Lenovo won, flat out. Apple was the worst. A couple years later, Apple was on top and boasting about it. However, they changed because the spotlight was put on them. They work to a different standard now because people are holding them to a higher standard. So, it's not all altruistic. But this doesn't really matter, as your point still holds (now, anyways).

Apple changed when the spotlight was put on the industry, way before the spotlight was put on Apple.

The thing that really gets me is now that spotlight is only on Apple, not the industry. There is a factor of decreasing gains, Apple can only do so much - meanwhile the rest of the industry laughs and continues to do whatever the hell they like, burning egrets to make bezels or what have you.

That is what is making me angry, that the focus on Apple is a HUGE opportunity cost for cleaning up all other consumer

If you had read carefully about that report, you would have noticed that Greenpeace made a report based on promises that companies made. As an example, HP promised to get rid of BFRs (Brominated Flame Retardants) within a few years and got 10 points of that, while Apple made no such promise and got zero points. What Greenpeace had missed was that Apple didn't make that promise because the had already removed all BFRs! So Greenpeace's rated vague promises for the future higher than action that had already ta

It was one of the most hypocritical posts I have seen in the sea of/. hypocrisy. The walled garden argument is so lame. Calling everyone who says anything positive about Apple a fanboi is equally lame.

Walled garden argument is lame? Hasn't happened yet. And the fanboi argument comes from the uncritical "I won't buy anything else because I decided Apple is slightly more 'ethical' than those other guys." As to "hypocritical"? It means doing or believing other that what one says. What in that person's post indicates that they do so, much less that they are particularly extreme at it.

They are leaving because they can dump toxic waste straight into the rivers there and treat workers VERY poorly. they can expose them to chemicals you'd never get away with here, unsafe working conditions that would never be allowed, and basically they are nothing but "disposable people". It is no accident that over 10% of the farmland in China is now so toxic the produce from them is unfit for human consumption or 9 out of the top 10 cancer causing cities are in China.

I am not unsympathetic to current events in India and China but why are the economic events taking place their now any different to what took place in Europe and the USA around a century ago?

I have Indian colleagues in my work team and even they will fully admit that personal wealth plays a big factor in Indian society and the caste system that still exists there - I suspect the same is true in China where the new rich there are able to use their new wealth to buy properties in London and spend their money

And some decide to stay in the gutter. That is your choice, but don't pretend you are better than me because of it.

Why do you think he is pretending he is better than you? The rest of the quote you conveniently left out is

because I don't buy into walled gardens, it's that simple.

It sounds to me like the closed ecosystem doesn't appeal to him. Saying that "some decide to stay in the gutter" sounds like you are pretending that you are better because you purchased a particular brand.

I've been using computers now for more than a quarter of a century and never felt the least bit inclined to buy any Apple product because nothing they've ever made would ever have enhanced my computing experience - and, yes, as a techno-geek I keep abreast of as many new products as I can, Apple or not Apple.

At this moment in time, I use mostly Linux - but even that doesn't do all I need a computer to do which is why I also do a lot of work on

For example I recently noted that a 24" 1080p monitor from Samsung was "made" in Mexico.

Yes but what are conditions like THERE? I can only imagine the horrors that would be easily hid in Mexico...

But since we lack any visibly into TV manufacturing I suppose possibly Mexican assembly workers may be treated better... it's a pretty large jump to make though, with no facts to back up what is the better choice. I'm limping along with older equipment until I know better (and no, I'm not waiting for Apple to pro

Whatever the conditions in a Mexican factory might be, the workers are there by choice. Communism is dead in that country, and folks there aren't generally told what jobs they must do. It might have been different a long time ago (when I lived there as a kid, the mountain overlooking our house featured a giant hammer-and-sickle formed from boulders, which I'm told has since been destroyed).

Life is full of choices. If I have the choice to buy products made in a country who has a history of treating their workers respectfully, I do so. Even little things: I like fasteners made by company called Spax, for instance. Their manufacturing happens either in Germany or not so far from me in Bryan, Ohio (also home of the Etch-a-Sketch), and either one is perfectly fine with me and -vastly- preferable over anything which might be Chinese in origin because I can be reasonably certain that their workers are well-paid.

But given a choice between China and Mexico, I prefer Mexico, just because anything I can do to support my neighbors to the south is far preferable to supporting a country on the other side of the world. Put simply: I'd rather see Mexico's economy do well, than see China's do the same, since the former will have a greater positive influence on the economy of my own country.

Whatever the conditions in a Mexican factory might be, the workers are there by choice.

I disagree that that differs at all from conditions in China. The Chinese workers are the ones that seek to work in the factories. They can also leave at any time, the state does not have to force them to work there because there are so many that wish to.

In both countries poverty makes the factory choice much more appealing than the peasant countryside life.

People tend to seek what employment there is. In a country with very few work options, where people are very poor, and where big business is drug cartels, then of course many people will find work in drug cartels. What else are desperate people going to do?

However, if other businesses can thrive as well, then people will have choices other than drugs. So buying "honest goods" from a place such as Mexico surely would help the country out of its crisis, in the long term.

For those curious, the best way to help Mexicans out (besides the way I already mentioned and you missed) is of course greatly increased ability to move across borders to work, but failing that the next best way for the individual to help is to support micro loans for people in Mexico, to rebuild the economy from the inside up.

I mention that for the benefit of those who have not replaced their brain with a second misshapen penis, and therefore support enslaving the people of Mexico to make your toaster.

I think you're projecting a fair amount into what it means to be a 'neighbor' in the modern world. From my standpoint, China is a neighbor in most of the ways that Mexico is a neighbor to you. Half my family members are from China, half my coworkers are from China, I visit Chinese web sites on the internet, and its a one day flight away. In principle I could walk, bicycle, or drive to Mexico, but in practice I would fly there also. And the Chinese and American economies are joined at the hip: what happ

I just want to know where he plans on spending his money...You can't build a computer of any kind without parts from Asia. Even all of those companies with the american flags in their ads are just assembling parts from Asia.

Come on... were you honestly expecting Apple (the most secretive consumer electronics company on the planet) to announce to the world that they're building a special assembly line for Apple iTV's months before they're ready to ship?

Actually it's probably more likely that they have 4 shifts, not 3. 3 8-hour shifts makes a 24 hour day, but you then have those same sets of people working 7 days a week -- but if you rotate schedules, go to a 12 hour shift, it's really simple to have a plant running 24/7 with 4 crews of employees putting in 3-5 days per 'week', and if any critical employee can't show up on any given shift of any given day -- there's always 2 other employees not working the following shift who can be brought in to cover fo

They aren't all working at the same time. I have no idea what kind of shifts they run, but I would have to assume at least 2, probably 3 or 4 if all the worker protection stuff has actually come to fruition. So you numbers are kind of off.